Understanding life – how we know the reality of self-formation, teleology, and agency of an organism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17792829 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christoph J Hueck (0009-0008-2513-1919, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-11 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1568-7759 • E-ISSN: 1572-8676 |
| Publisher | Springer Nature (PUBLISHER • SG) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s11097-026-10139-1 |
| OpenAlex | W7134895196 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 70 |
Organisms represent a persistent challenge for science and philosophy. Reductionist approaches increasingly appear insufficient, while organicist accounts describe the essential features of living beings without explaining their possibility. Immanuel Kant showed that organisms must be conceived as teleologically structured and self-forming wholes in order to be recognized at all. Yet his critical philosophy also reveals the limits of such recognition: while the understanding cannot perceive organicity as an objective feature of nature, reflective judgment can attribute purposiveness only in a merely regulative way. In this paper, I examine in detail the epistemological conditions for recognizing a developing organism and argue that the cognition of organic structure, development, purposiveness, and agency requires the coordinated operation of sensory apprehension, imaginative reproduction, conceptual recognition, and spontaneous apperception. Each of these faculties entails a distinct relation between subject and object. I show that in the cognition of development, purposiveness, and agency, the Kantian separation between understanding and reason becomes strained, for the subject–object division presupposed in the application of the categories progressively diminishes. I propose that this tension indicates a limit of Kant’s framework and motivates a systematic extension of it: the “causality of the concept,” which for Kant remains merely regulative, becomes a constitutive condition for the possibility of experiencing an organism as a self-organizing and agential whole. Such an expanded epistemological analysis suggests corresponding ontological implications and enables a deeper understanding of the reality of living beings
Organism · Philosophy of mind · Sense of agency · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Origins and Evolution of Life · Plant and Biological Electrophysiology Studies
Synthesis
Two Kinds of Mechanical Inexplicability in Kant and Aristotle
Organisms, Agency, and Evolution
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
Kant and the Claims of Knowledge
Life after Kant
The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy
Kant on Pure Apperception and Indeterminate Empirical Inner Intuition
Pure Synthesis and the Principle of the Synthetic Unity of Apperception
Kant and the Capacity to Judge
Autopoiesis and Cognition
Teleology then and now
Empirical vitalism
Two directions for teleology
Teleology and the organism
Kant’s concept of natural purpose and the reflecting power of judgement
On Naturalizing Kant's Transcendental Psychology
Kant‘s Transcendental Psychology
Kant on biological teleology
Kant and the Problem of Recognition
Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency
Knowledge of Life
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |